


What is Enough

by Goodluckdetective (scorpiontales)



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Angst, Hospitalization, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-06-02 17:52:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6576526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiontales/pseuds/Goodluckdetective
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When will anything be enough?</p>
<p>Wash has an idea, but that doesn't mean he's gonna get it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What is Enough

Wash came back to consciousness slow.

His head hurt. His mouth was dry. The thin sheet they had over his torso, hospital if he had to guess, was both too thick and too thin. Back when he had Epsilon removed, he remembered feeling like this; hurt, confused and so very tired. It had taken him a week to open his eyes without seeing Alison hovering over him.

He opened his eyes. Above him was no image of Alpha’s most persistent ghost. Instead, he found himself face to face, with a hollow eyed, tight lipped, Lavernius Tucker.

“You’re awake,” Tucker said in a way that told Wash it wasn’t the first time he’d woken up. Wash thought about nodding but the idea of moving his head at all hurt too much to even think about. When he opened his mouth, words were impossible to form. Too out of it still.

Tucker ran his hand down his face. Wash wondered if the wrinkles he was noticing were new from whatever hell Wash just put him through, or if Wash was  just oblivious to him aging over the last year. He took a deep breath through his nose, he was angry, oh, Wash had fucked something up this time, and Wash struggled to remember what he could have done to piss off the other man so.   

“If you’d told me about this sooner, we could’ve prevented this,” Tucker said. He sounded exhausted. Wash licked his lips, searching for the right words and when none came, Tucker looked up at the ceiling. Wash was sure he was glaring at it.

“You had a fucking stroke, man.”

It all clicked into place. The hospital. Tucker being terribly angry. The feeling like his head had gone and exploded.

“Oh,” Wash said, finding words for the first time since he woke up. “That.”

It felt like the greatest understatement of the year.

* * *

To say Wash survived Freelancer in perfect shape would be a lie.

It would be a lie no one would believe either, the scars both physical and mental plain to see. A cut above his lip to show the crash that almost killed him in the process. The nightmares of a woman long dead he will never escape. The implants in his skull that feel too open to the world. No, Wash had been returned from Freelancer with damages. It was public record.

What was not public record was what those implants and multiple concussions could bring in the future, if he wasn’t careful.

“Agent Washington,” Doctor Grey said, snapping in front of his face. Wash pulled himself out of his trance, shaking his head. Even with the war done for almost two months, Doctor Grey held every check up with an air of urgency that made Wash feel like the bombs were still falling. “Are you listening to me?”

Oh, he was. He just rather wished he hadn’t.

“I have to avoid getting my head knocked again,” Wash said. “I already knew that-”

He stopped when Grey pointed her perfectly manicured finger right in his face. Wash knew to fear those hands. They could hurt as easily as they could heal.

“You, sir,  are sugar coating,” she said, voice firm. “You do not have to avoid getting your head knocked again. You have to not get your head knocked again, unless you want to risk a brain damage or a stroke.” Wash opened his mouth but Doctor Grey wasn’t having it. “I mean it, Mr. A stroke, Agent Washington. A stroke.”

Wash crossed his arms, leaning back against the wall the examination table was set next to. “So what? I just put down my gun and let Hargrove run for it?”

“Of course not,” Doctor Grey walked across the room and pulled of her gloves.  “You put down your gun and do tactical work. Important work, but work that won’t end up with your brain in a jar in the morgue.”

Wash tilted his head. “My brain would be in a jar?”

“Don’t worry about that. Worry about the morgue part.”

Wash looked up at the ceiling where large cracks could be seen spreading across the cement. Since USNC support arrived, the conditions of their hospitals had been getting better but it was slow work. They were still understaffed, still undersupplied, and terribly overrun. With the war decimating civilians and military alike, the few medical buildings that remained operation greatly needed repair. Wash wondered if the cracks he saw were from explosion tremors or just plain old wear and tear.

It was Hargrove’s fault that they were in this mess, Wash thought, that the civilians of Chrorus couldn’t see a doctor unless they were bleeding out or considered “important.” Could Wash really let leaving the man to run while someone else chased him down? After what he pulled on this planet? On his friends? On Epsilon?

“Desk work, Agent Washington,” Doctor Grey said. “Desk work.” She smiled. “Maybe you could even get a cat.”

She left the room and left Wash to the silence.

* * *

This was how Wash decided to throw medical advice to the wind: his big stupid heart.

He thought it had gotten smaller over the years, after everything he’d been through. After Freelancer, he’d built walls to keep everyone out, to keep himself from being hurt again. He was so sure he was safe.

He should have expected the Simulation troopers to open that fortress eventually. They were quite familiar with breaking through walls.

Here was Wash was going to do. He was going to moan and bitch about being benched. He was going to get tested for every possible mission he could take and look into equipment that would keep his squishy brain from giving out on him. He was going to take that painfully boring desk job up until someone found a way to get him back in the field, and then he was going to adopt a cat to keep him from going insane as he directed his friends over a com.

Then Tucker came in and threw that entire plan to the wind.

Wash went to him first to talk about the news, finding Tucker in the training room as usual. He’d been there a lot since Charon, a combination of grief, regret and determination keeping him practicing at least once during the day. Back when he’d first started, Wash had been convinced he’d give it up. After a week had passed, he was more worried Tucker would burn himself into the ground. A month later, he’d started to realize predicting Tucker was useless.

Tucker was fighting the holos again, a program Felix used to spar with dancing around him. He was getting better at the sword fighting thing, using a holo sword to practice. And man was that practice paying off. When the hologram dived forward in an attempt to stab Tucker in the stomach, the man dodged.  When the hologram threw a knife, Tucker blocked it. When the hologram tried to trip him up, Tucker didn’t even flinch.

Wash looked at the timer for the fight, and when he saw it was five minutes, he smiled. When Tucker first started, he couldn’t last five seconds.

“Tucker,” Wash said, leaning against the training room wall. Tucker almost jumps in surprise and the shock of it gives the holo an opening to put its fist through Tucker’s chest. When the timer beeps and declares the holo a winner, Tucker’s groan can probably be heard throughout the base.

“Dude, no talking and fighting. I can only handle one at once,” he turned to Wash and wiped sweat off his brow. He had to be at this for awhile. Tucker took a step forward and dropped his holo sword to the ground. “What did you think?”

“Not bad,” Wash said. “Still needs work though. If you can’t talk and fight, you’re never going to banter again.”

“Yeah, fuck you too.” Tucker grinned for a second before his face grew serious. “You hear anything about Hargrove? Cus Carolina says she has a few leads she wants to check out-”

Wash cringed. Here it came. Time to fess up to the axe in his career coffin. “About that-”

Tucker stopped, looking at him expectant. There was a thin line over his eyebrow and Wash could remember the cut that was there after he got off Charon, how scared Wash had been when he thought all the blood on Tucker’s face was something worse. What would it be like to send him out there and wait for him to come back? To hear everything over a com line without being able to do anything? To be like he was during Charon, too far away, as his men fought for their lives? His friends. His family. Tucker.

“Tucker,” Wash said. “Do you really want to do this? Go after Hargrove?”

Tucker looked at him for a long moment. Wash could remember a time when he’d be sure of his answer, when Tucker could be swayed to stay back if Wash gave him enough motivation. When ending this war was the biggest axe to grind they all had.

Tucker’s eyes narrowed. His mouth pressed into a thin line. And in that moment, Wash knew that the desk job weren’t happening, that he wasn’t going to tell anyone Grey’s orders for some well deserved RnR, and that the cat would have to be put on hold as long as he was following this asshole around the galaxy.

“Yes.”

Wash nodded.

“Then I’m coming with.”

* * *

Sometimes Wash would later think what would happen if he decided to tell Carolina about his brain first instead of Tucker. If he would have stayed in that desk job with that stupid cat. It he would be happier not having to constantly be worried about a blow to the head.

It usually took a glance of Tucker smiling at him for him to realize “absolutely not.”

* * *

Somewhere between jumping on a ship to Grey’s disapproving stare from suffering a stroke that doctors didn’t think he’d pull out of without brain damage, Wash realized that he’d been missing the obvious all this time.

After all, there was a difference between following a group of your idiot friends to keep them safe and being alright with fighting another car if it meant getting Tucker to laugh.

It dawned on him slow. When they were clearing gear, when he was helping Tucker practice, when they were laughing at the Reds getting into another fight about Red team history. It hit him like every cliche in the book, like the clouds parting on a cloudy day, like getting struck by lightning, like waking up from a good dream.

Like sitting next to this fool of a man and remembering a time when he used to be David.

If he was a smarter man, Wash thought, he’d probably realize that lovesickness like this will end up getting him killed.

Just this once, Wash was okay with being stupid.

* * *

For one year, Wash avoided getting hit in the head.

At first, he was almost over the top about avoiding it. He avoided hand to hand combat fights. Whenever he had to dive, he made sure to catch himself or cover his head first. Whenever he was out in the open, his helmet and its new layer of extra padding was on.

Time passed. He didn’t get hit. Complacency set in. For the first time in a long time, Wash thought he might actually get lucky.

Then a grenade landed right in front of his feet and well-

Wash had never been lucky.

* * *

After Tucker glared at him for what felt like almost an hour, the doctor decided to finally come in and tell Wash how royally he was fucked.

If Wash’s medical record was long before, it was almost absurdly long now, almost two pages of notes and issues. Partial numbness in his left arm. Regular headaches. Likely chronic fatigue. Seizures from his neural plants getting jarred in the explosion.

It said something about Wash’s life, Wash thought, that he didn’t think it was quite that bad.

“You knew this entire time,” Tucker said from his spot in the visitor's’ chair, after the doctors had left. “You knew this could happen and you went off to play hero anyway.” He gritted his teeth and Wash could see his fingers dig into the arms of the chair. “Was it because of us? Were you that worried of us getting hurt that you had to put your life on the line at first?”

The answer to that was complicated, a string of yes and no that Wash didn’t feel like unpacking for Tucker to see. After a moment of silence, Tucker stood up and looked over him. Made eye contact.

“Was saving Chorus not enough for you, man?”

Wash closed his eyes. Now there was the question. What was enough? Working in Freelancer? Getting his Freedom? Saving Chorus? Catching Hargrove? Once upon a time it might have been.

Now? Wash opened his eyes and took in the man he’d fallen in love with without noticing. The man who deserved so much better than he could ever be.

No. It was not enough. 


End file.
